Each year many accidents are caused by drivers who have fallen asleep behind the wheel of a vehicle. It would be a benefit, therefore, to have a device that could be installed within the passenger compartment of a vehicle and that would provide an audible output to maintain the alertness of the driver. Because different drivers can respond better to different stimuli, it would be a benefit to have a device for maintaining the alertness of a driver that could be installed within the passenger compartment of a vehicle and that allowed a user to select from a number of audible output messages for maintaining the alertness of the driver. It would be a further benefit to have such a driver alertness maintaining device that allowed a user to set the message repeating frequency of the audible output to a desired interval that was sufficient to maintain the alertness of the driver. In addition, it would be a further benefit to have a driver alertness maintaining device that included a visual alerting mechanism as well as an audible output to maintain the alertness of the driver. To increase the impact of the driver alertness maintaining device it would be desirable to have visual and audible alerting mechanisms that were initiated simultaneously and at user selected intervals.